Author: Marc Weidenbaum

This is the fifth set in the Refresher Course series. I’ve begun going back through the archives of this website from the very beginning, about 7,500 posts ago. The first four sets consisted of 10 posts each. Posting every day seemed a bit much for the site’s readers, so I decided for the fifth set I’d wait until I had read back through 30 posts. However, I now think 30 posts is a little much in its own right, so I may try 20 next time. Anyhow, this latest tranche includes:

Reviews of Oval and Christophe Charles album Dok, an Up, Bustle and Out record, the compilation Blip, Bleep (Soundtracks to Imaginary Video Games), Underworld’s Beaucoup Fish, Funki Porcini’s The Ultimately Empty Million Pounds, a Hollowman project, Chessie’s Signal Series, Michael Nyman’s The Piano score, Orbital’s The Middle of Nowhere, Borden Raczynski’s Boku Mo Wakaran, Bill Laswell’s Panthalassa — The Remixes, and Moby’s Play, which I gave a particularly negative take on, but over the years I came to really enjoy the album. Also, my favorite releases of 1997 and 1998.

A ton of interviews: Autechre’s Sean Booth (1997), Coldcut’s Matt Black (1887), DJ Food talking about a David Byrne remix (1997), Amon Tobin not once but twice (1997, 1998), Photek (1998), Rob Zombie of White Zombie (1999) talking about sampling and personal memory, Dub Assassin (1999), Moby (1999), Bogdan Raczynski (1999) in an email interview (unusual at the time), and an essay with four different interview subjects about jazz and electronica (Beth Custer, Jack Dangers, Nils Petter Molvaer, and Ben Neill). That last one was only just recently added to this site, and such are the time-warping complexities of datelines.

And a grab bag of other items: a riff on the use of “NP” (for “now playing”), and apparently I thought emoticons were over; the music-slowing software Slow Gold II; how to listen to pi (the number); an essay in the mock-style of the For Dummies series, so sort of a joke, except the recommendations are real; and what I think is the earliest “sounds of brands” piece on this site, a mention of music in VW ads.

This is the fourth set of the process of my making my way, in chronological order, from the earliest entries on this website, all the way through the 7,500+ that have accumulated since December 1996, when the site launched. That number includes posts from before 1996, those that I later ported from print media and other writing opportunities.

As I finished the third set this weekend, it occurred to me that 10 posts a day may be a burden for the reader, so I may slow the pace a bit — not of the re-archiving, but of these summary posts. I may do one every 30 archived posts, which would mean roughly every three days, rather than a summary post every single day for each set of 10 I’ve cleaned up. We’ll see. Also, rather than lay them out here as bullet points, I may summarize them thematically, at least when doing so applies.

The main item in the set of 10 I looked over today is a 1996 interview with Markus Popp of Oval, both the original published profile, and the full text of the Q&A that informed the profile.

There are a bunch of reviews. In some cases, the albums aren’t online, at least not on official channels. This batch includes the Sci-Fi Cafe compilation (covers of movie and TV theme music by the likes of Loop Guru and Kinder Atom), a Tone Rec album, a Kiyoshi Izumi release on Aphex Twin’s Rephlex label, an Asian Dub Foundation/Atari Teenage Riot split, a Toru Takemitsu compilation, a Steve Roach album, a great David Holmes album I still listen to regularly, and Francis Dhomont’s Frankenstein Symphony, which I single out because it is featured in the screenshot of the earliest evidence on the Internet Archive of Disquiet.com:

And finally, there’s mention of a 1997 musical episode of Chicago Hope, which name-checks Dennis Potter. Musical episodes of TV shows have become so common that I’m not sure how many people producing them or participating in them these days are aware of the importance of Potter to the format.